The warrantless-search story is now in its fifth day and I keep waiting for the vaunted White House political machine to come up with a compelling defense that doesn’t include, “the president can do whatever he wants.” I’ve seen these guys spin some pretty ugly facts — Bush, after all, won a second term despite an indefensible record on pretty much everything — and I’ve assumed it’s only a matter of time before this NSA surveillance program had a set of talking points Republicans can repeat with a straight face.<\/p>\n
Except it hasn’t happened. The administration has tried offering a few justifications for their decisions, but to date, none of them make any sense. Let’s review.<\/p>\n
* There was a check on presidential power because Congress was briefed<\/em> — Wrong. First, the legal check was to go FISA courts. Second, a handful of lawmakers received briefings, but they were a joke, featuring key omissions<\/a>, unanswered questions, and no recourse<\/a> to those who felt the tactics were illegal.<\/p>\n * Bush had to circumvent the law because of the need for speed<\/em> — Wrong. FISA allows the administration to tap a line and get permission up to three days later<\/a>.<\/p>\n * All of the monitored calls were international<\/em> — Wrong. An undetermined number of the calls were “accidentally” included despite being purely domestic communications<\/a>. <\/p>\n * The 9\/11 resolution passed by Congress empowered Bush to take these kinds of actions<\/em> — Wrong. Members of Congress from both parties who voted for the law have said that they had no idea<\/a> the administration would interpret it to cover such a step. In a review of the five-hour House debate, no mention of intelligence gathering in general or electronic surveillance in particular — or of bypassing warrants — could be found. John McCain said, “I think it’s probably clear we didn’t know we were voting for that.” Arlen Specter added that he is “very, very skeptical” about Bush’s explanation.<\/p>\n * A 2002 decision by the FISA appeals court approved warrantless searches<\/em> — Wrong. Conservatives are badly misreading<\/a> the relevant judicial ruling.<\/p>\n * 9\/11 could have been prevented if Bush had implemented warrantless searches sooner<\/em> — Wrong. A 2002 inquiry into the case by the House and Senate intelligence committees blamed interagency communication breakdowns<\/a> — not shortcomings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or any other intelligence-gathering guidelines.<\/p>\n * The Clinton administration backed warrantless searches under FISA in 1994 and through a program called Echelon<\/em> — Wildly misleading. The Clinton administration said physical searches weren’t covered by FISA in 1994 because they were accurately describing<\/a> what the law was at the time. Of course, Clinton supported a change to FISA in 1995 to include physical searches and never backed the notion of presidential authority that can circumvent FISA. As for Echelon, unlike the Bush program, it complied with FISA<\/a>.<\/p>\n C’mon, Bush White House, I know you can do better than this. If not, we’re inclined to think this is a pretty serious scandal after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The warrantless-search story is now in its fifth day and I keep waiting for the vaunted White House political machine to come up with a compelling defense that doesn’t include, “the president can do whatever he wants.” I’ve seen these guys spin some pretty ugly facts — Bush, after all, won a second term despite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6149\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}